Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

The other day we ordered a large whiteboard for our office.  The board arrived some time later, complete with a bunch of whiteboard markers and whiteboard eraser.  Gladly we put it up and started writing our plan for the world domination.

A few moments later, when we tried to do some corrections, we realized that we can’t really eraze much from the whiteboard. Hmmm.

Marker theory check.  Are all of them marked as “whiteboard markers”?  Yes.

Marker practice check.  We tried to write something with each one of them and then tried to delete it.  Only greek could have been erased easily.  Turned out that four markers (black, blue, red, and green) were from a total of three different brands.  Red and blue were from the same maker.

Because we were rather pressed on time, we covered the whole whiteboard with green text and diagrams.  Then we called the bookshop and asked to bring us more markers of the same brand with green.  People in the bookshop were rather puzzled by the request, but confirmed that we will receive more markers the next day.

The guy that brought the markers tested them on the board and saw that they could have been easily erased.  Then he tried the other ones and saw that it was almost impossible to eraze them.  Then he asked for a knife.

It was our turn to feel puzzled and confused, but we found a knife for him.

… five seconds later, it was our turn to feel really stupid.  Apparently, the whiteboard was covered with transparent plastic film to protect its surface.  It was absolutely invisible and looked and felt exactly like the whiteboard surface itself.  Once the film was peeled off, the new shiny surface of the whiteboard was revealed.   And, of course, all whiteboard markers - old and new - could be used normally.  We tested them all and we could eraze everything easily.  The magic moment!

I would like to take this opportunity and thank the guy from the bookshop, who solved a big problem of ours, and … didn’t laugh in our face, like many would do in a similar situation (tech support stories anyone?).  As a matter of fact, he didn’t even smile.  I bet he had a blast once he left our offices, but that doesn’t matter, because it was, indeed, funny.

Celine Roque of Web Worker Daily makes yet another observation that makes one nod his head in agreement:

There’s a slight irony about being a web worker and staying in your home office most of the time.

The post goes on to suggest a few ways to spice up your life, in case you are a web worker…

Today I was at my bank. I had to cash a check, as well as do a couple of other small things. While at that, I decided to open a credit card. I have some cards already, but not one in Euro. So, they send me upstairs to see this guy there. He is responsible for credit cards, overdrafts, loans, and things like that. I’ve seen him before a few times.

This guy hates me. It’s OK though, because I think he hates everybody. Probably, he is very good at his job, since he is paid to hate everyone. People who will max out their overdrafts, overdue payments, etc - he is the one who filters them out. And it surely helps to hate them all.

Every time I enter his office he looks at me like he is trying to decide who is more worthless a Cypriot woman or a foreign man. He tries to remember anything good about Cypriot women. His wife and mother-in-law come to mind. That disgusts the heck out of him. Then he looks at me, measures me from top to bottom and back to top, makes a face like he just ate a huge cockroach, and decides that his mother-in-law is a little bit better than I am. Then he says: “Good morning”. These two words express more than some people will manage to express in their whole life. These two words have the whole world inside them, the world where I am at the bottom of the food chain, and this guy is floating above the top… or something like that.

Usually, the visit to his office kind of offsets my day. He doesn’t freak me out or depress me or anything. But there is this sour feeling for the rest of the day, after I see him. But not today. Today he had no way of saying “no” to me. As much as he wanted to decline my request, send me as far as possible, and forget about me as fast as possible, he couldn’t do anything. He had to say “yes”.

That “yes” was as expressive as the “Good morning”. It made my day. Maybe even a week. Maybe even more. Any time that I will ever feel down and depressed, I will be coming back to read this post. It’s a booster.

P.S.: obviously, I am not going to mention the bank, the branch, or the guy’s name, but some of you can guess it as easily anyway.

Caught this excellent quote in gaping void post:

A lot of people in business say they have twenty years experience, when in fact all the really have is one year’s experience, repeated twenty times.

Well said, indeed. I’m working with computers for 15 years or so.  I’d say I have only about five years of experience with these damn things.

Over the last few years I’ve made several attempts at improving my personal finance management. With the exception of the last six month, I never tracked my spendings for more than a month or so. Two main reasons for that were:

1. I never was on a financial edge for more than a month or so.
2. I don’t enjoy accounting all that much and I never had a tool that made it anymore pleasurable.

Each of my finance tracking periods has been guided by a different tool. I tried a few approaches from plain text and spreadsheet files, through custom written scripts, to widely used applications. None of those worked for me, except for the last one I tried - GnuCash.

I use GnuCash for about six month now. It’s a really nice application, which implemented a few ideas right. But for me two things made it - documentation (especially 3 pages of Accounting 101 shipped with the software) and the wizard which asked a few simple questions and created some accounts for me to use. I started with the simple things, and somehow they worked. Then I tried a few more advanced ones (multi-currency, transaction splits, etc), and I still loved it.

I still love GnuCash. But I am starting to feel the need for a web-based tool. As good as GnuCash is, it has a number of pitfalls for me:

• All data is on a single computer. I need to back it up myself. I can’t access it if my laptop is not with me.
• My mostly used tool is Firefox browser, and I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t use it for my accounting too.
• Web-based services can offer additional goodies such as SMS/IM integration, email reminders, social aspects, and so on.

So, today I started looking for a replacement. My quest began at the LifeHacker post titled “Is Mint Realy For Your Money?” The article reviewed Mint.com service, while comments suggested a few alternative solutions.

Here are the services that I tried. Note - I haven’t spent much time with any one of them. Mostly those were brief sessions of register - create an account - create a few transactions - check the settings - logout.

Yodlee MoneyCenter - looks like something feature complete, but the interfaces are overly complicated and there is a certain degree of paranoia with logging in and out. While it looked like Yodlee was doing everything I needed all at once, the complexity of the interfaces and the general speed of the site made me go away without spending much time there.

Wesabe - got me impressed. Twice. Just a few minutes after I registered, I got an email from one of the co-founders - Marc Hedlund, welcoming me to the community. Marc caught my twit, followed to this blog, read a few recent entries (especially those about privacy concerns and Firefox extensions). His welcoming message provided a few extra pointers in the areas that I appeared to be interested in. Wow! I’ve seen a lot of services with personalized, fast responding support teams, but Wesabe guys (there is a blog and forum too) are a couple of levels above anything that I can remember.

The second impression on me was by Wesabe’s tagging system. Again, being a web addict I’ve seen plenty of sites and applications that use tagging. Wesabe did something really cool - they kept the simplicity of the concept while greatly extending the functionality. You can do anything with tags there. It’s very similar to the way Flickr uses tags for some internal stuff, but here tags are given to the user.

Regarding the functionality, Wesabe takes a more social approach to finance tracking and accounting. Most of the boring stuff is simplified and automated. Things which are used most often are implemented in the very straightforward way. And there is just enough of functionality to make it useful without cluttering the service interfaces and users minds.

There are a couple of limitations that prevent me from using this service right now though. None of the Cyprus banks support a straightforward export of data in any format that can be used to input accounts into Wesabe. So, I’m left with only cash-type accounts. And currently those cash-type accounts in Wesabe cannot track the account balance (no opening balance, reconciliation, etc). Marc mentioned that account balances will be added to cash accounts shortly, since many people requested them. Once this done, I’ll jump back to Wesabe with my bank statements. Really, really neat service.

ClearCheckBook.com - looked like I can work only with one currency at a time. That’s not acceptable. I use three at the moment - CYP, USD, and EUR. CYP with gradually disappear over the next few month, but I’m stuck with USD and EUR for some time to come.

Then I finally got to the service which started my quest today - Mint.com . Unfortunately, I wasn’t at all able to try it out, because it supports only United States banks and financial institutions. There was no way for me to avoid account import from one of those places where I don’t have an account.

So, as you can see from the above paragraphs, Wesabe is the one closest to my needs.  And compared to the other ones it is so much nicer that I’d rather wait for those features that I need rather than settle for something that I don’t enjoy half as much.

What other services are there?  Did I miss anything?